Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login Karabiner – Easy Keyboard Remapping for OS X (github.com) 131 points by fspacef 13 hours ago | hide | past | web | 73 comments | favorite add comment JohnGB 1 hour ago [-] Karabiner (and its predecessor) is invaluable for me every day use of my macbook. In general using a touchpad feels like trying to type with only one finger, but with the "multi-touch exension" (I think it's based on touchsense), allows me to redefine my keyboard depending on what's happening on my touchpad. So, now my left hand is always on the home keys, and if I'm touching the touchpad with one finger, the home keys are my left, right, and middle mouse buttons. If I'm touching it with two fingers, the home keys and nearby keys remap to save, refresh, find, select all, copy, paste, cut, close, and others. If three fingers are touching, then my keys remap to my windows layout and other utility programs which I often call (such as the terminal). There are many other general remappings which have made my life at a keyboard much faster and easier to use, but the multi-touch extensions are the ones that I would struggle to live without. As a side note, if you use the product and find it helpful, you should really consider donating to it. It will make you feel like a better human, and encourage continued support. reply lars512 11 hours ago [-] I used Karabiner for a month after getting hit by a car and breaking my right wrist. I couldn't use that hand at all whilst it healed. I had Karabiner remap my keyboard to half-qwerty, so that I could type entirely using my left hand on the left side of the keyboard only. A modifier key would switch it into "mirror mode" so that all the left-side keys would be remapped to right-side keys. Fun stuff! reply milesokeefe 11 hours ago [-] Once you regained use of your right hand did it take any time to get back to full typing speed using both hands? How close to your two hand WPM did you achieve with your left hand alone? reply lars512 2 hours ago [-] The biggest obstacle was the swelling in the wrist after surgery. I had to keep it elevated for quite a long time, and it would throb and be painful when I lowered it to the keyboard. That passed gradually over 2 months. The finger dexterity never left, the moments I held my hand there I could type at ~80% speed without problems from early on. With just my left hand, I could only manage more like 20%, which felt very very slow to me. The bottleneck with half-querty was the modifier key, which I had to hit very often to switch layouts. If you could move that to something else, that layout could speed up much more. Had I been out of action much longer, I might have tried some kind of custom one-handed chording setup instead. reply lj3 8 hours ago [-] I'm adding my comment here to "pile on" and say that I'm very interested in the answers to these questions, too. I tried to learn a one handed keyboard back in college (Matias Half Keyboard) just to see if there was any benefit to always having one hand on the kb and one on the mouse. I never did find out; I gave up learning how to type with one hand after a month and sent the keyboard back. reply tomcam 5 hours ago [-] Just had to put left arm in a brace and would like to hear results too. reply neurocroc 13 hours ago [-] This application has been really huge for my productivity. I have literally rebinded every single key on my mac with it. It is very powerful especially when you combine it with the multitude of Alfred workflows and different scripts that you can run. I open Alfred with just single press of right command, I switch between all my apps through hotkeys, my caps lock is a hyper key, my right shift is delete. Can't give more praise to this tool really. Here is how I use it and what my config file for it looks like for all interested : https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/tree/master/karab... More importantly, it allows to keep myself sane with the enormous amounts of apps and tools I run on my system (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os) and interchange with them seamlessly. reply Singletoned 3 hours ago [-] With all that software, I don't suppose you've come up with a good solution for installing and configuring it all automatically on a new machine? Last time I tried to automate it I used homebrew cask, but it definitely wasn't a satisfying solution. reply wingerlang 23 minutes ago [-] For most apps, can't you just keep the config files on e.g. dropbox? reply fspacef 5 hours ago [-] Nice guide, was planning to do something like that myself. reply konart 13 hours ago [-] https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner/issues/660 You should probably consider reading this if you are on 10.12 or planning to upgrade reply xwvvvvwx 11 hours ago [-] Karabiner-Elements works perfectly for me on 10.12 (I only use it to remap caps-lock to escape). https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements reply konart 1 hour ago [-] Yeah, that's why I've provided the link :) Alternatives! reply statictype 8 hours ago [-] That's exactly what I use it for and just set it up yesterday. The instructions on the home page are fairly abysmal though. reply rgoodwintx 7 hours ago [-] Ditto to the readme on GH. The key (ahem) bits: 1. Create ~/.karabiner.d/configuration/karabiner.json 2. Put some stuff in it (my simple example below) 3. Install the app from the GH page. Key definitions are in the source code, but if you check the Issues discussion on the Elements project, you'll probably find good examples to send you on your way. Sample karabiner.json: { "profiles": [ { "name": "Default profile", "selected": true, "simple_modifications": { "right_option": "delete_forward" } } ] } reply jagger27 6 hours ago [-] I do a similar thing: Caps Lock mapped to Control on hold and also Escape on tap. reply dopu 12 hours ago [-] Seconding this. I'm now unable to use CAPS LOCK on my Mac as ESC, which makes using vim slightly more of a pain. reply codyb 10 hours ago [-] I map escape to jj which is pretty useful. Thanks to some article somewhere years ago fir that. reply evanrelf 12 hours ago [-] System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... > Set Caps Lock Key to Escape reply apetresc 11 hours ago [-] I don't believe 'Escape' is one of the options. On macOS Sierra, as for every previous version for me, the only choices to remap through the prefPane are "Caps Lock", "Control", "Option", and "Command". Hence why Seil/KarabinerElements is the first thing I install on a new Mac. reply robgough 9 hours ago [-] Apparently the latest beta (10.12.1) has support for this natively. https://github.com/tekezo/Seil/issues/68#issuecomment-250195... reply evanrelf 3 hours ago [-] Yeah, sorry I didn't specify. I am running the latest macOS Sierra beta. reply apetresc 8 hours ago [-] Oh, well then! Looking forward to the first Sierra update, in that case :) I really did not expect Apple to finally fill this gap that has been around for so many years. reply vhost- 10 hours ago [-] OS X nor macOS have the option to set caps lock to escape. This is why people who want to do this use Seil or Karabiner Elements. reply melling 12 hours ago [-] I upgraded to the Sierra beta yesterday and the i and h keys were reversed on my external mechanical keyboards. Seemed a bit strange. reply Someone 11 hours ago [-] Upgraded to the Sierra beta? Why? The real thing has been out since September 20. reply robotmlg 8 hours ago [-] 10.12.1 beta is already out reply evanrelf 12 hours ago [-] Happened to me too: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/64304 reply falconed 11 hours ago [-] I downgraded to el cap solely because karabiner stopped working in sierra. reply melling 6 hours ago [-] My 'a' key didn't work either. I filed a radar yesterday. reply torspo 3 hours ago [-] Since upgrading to Sierra broke my Karabiner, I started using Ukelele. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=... I tried Karabiner Elements but couldn't figure out how to replicate my configuration. reply mherdeg 3 hours ago [-] I use this tool because I like to run the binary distribution of nethack from the command line inside an OS X Terminal window, and I am VERY accustomed to using the up/down/left/right arrow keys to move around (from how things used to work when I ran Windows). It seemed really hard to send that binary "hjkl" instead of up/down/left/rgiht arrow key signals any other way and it also seemed hard to compile in the desired behavior by hand (although, hmm). I'm lazy, so I ended up just running Karabiner with this tiny private.xml: https://gist.github.com/mherdeg/4eca69637d176bc81ea19207b911... I found that I context-switched between places where I wanted the arrow key to send hjkl (Terminal.app running the binary) and places where I did not (everywhere else). To make things slightly easier, I set up a "profile" in Terminal.app called "nethack" which uses xterm-16color, displays ANSI colors in a readable way, sets the window title to "Nethack", and launches /usr/local/bin/nethack when this profile is opened.